By JAN LARSON McLAUGHLIIN
BG Independent News
After losing their jobs to coronavirus closures, more than 4,029 Wood County residents filed for unemployment compensation during the third week of March.
The week before, 2,222 local residents applied for unemployment, starting the waves of people out of work after businesses were ordered to shut down.
Those numbers are in stark contrast to the low numbers Wood County had been seeing. For example, just 68 people filed for jobless benefits in the first week of February.
The decisions to close non-essential businesses and issue a stay-at-home order in Ohio seem to have slowed the surge of COVID-19 cases. But the orders have created their own surge of people out of work – which Ohio is trying to handle, according to Bret Crow, spokesperson with the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services.
The magnitude of help needed statewide is massive, Crow said.
“Our online system is overloaded, but no one who built the system envisioned it would have to have the capacity needed now to handle an influx of claims that arrived essentially all at once,” Crow said.
The coronavirus shutdowns have created a different type of tidal wave in people newly facing unemployment.
“In previous recessions, the number of claims built steadily over time. Ohio is not unique in this situation of an overloaded system. Every state’s online claims system is in the same boat,” Crow said.
The state agency explained it this way – during past economic downturns, claims came in waves as the recession worsened and businesses closed gradually, over time. In this case, the claims came in all at once and created a tsunami.
For the week ending March 28, the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services reported 274,215 initial jobless claims to the U.S. Dept. of Labor, which set a record for the second straight week. The number of initial jobless claims filed in Ohio over the last two week stands at 468,414.
To put that in perspective, that’s more than the 364,603 initial jobless claims filed during the entire year in 2019, Crow noted.
“Over these last two weeks, we have issued unemployment compensation payments totaling more than $45 million to more than 108,000 claimants,” he said.
The agency is struggling to keep up with the demands.
“Fairly soon we will have 600 people helping claimants over the phone,” Crow said. “We have 459 doing that now and are training more.”
To put that in perspective, those 600 people represent about a quarter of the employees in the entire agency whose only focus right now is assisting Ohioans with their claims.
Currently, the volume of filers and callers is slowing down when people can submit their applications. But Crow pointed out that even if Ohioans can’t finish submitting an application right away, their filing date will be retroactive to when they first became eligible.
“In other words, eligible Ohioans need not worry that they will receive all the unemployment compensation benefits they are entitled to collect,” he said.
The hours of operation for the call center have also been expanded to a seven-day-a-week operation. Originally, the call center was only open 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. weekdays. The weekdays hours have been extended to 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. Also added was 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. on Saturdays, and most recently 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. on Sundays.
As the need for unemployment benefits has spiked, Gov. Mike DeWine and state lawmakers acted to temporarily waive requirements for applicants, such as actively seeking work and waiting one week to start receiving benefits.
The Ohio Department of Job and Family Services urges individuals to file their claims online, if possible, at unemployment.ohio.gov.
